The demonstrations had been called by reporters and activists, rallying around the slogan NiUnaMenos Not One Less , a call to stop the almost daily murders and disappearances of women and girls in the country.
In April that year, the novelist Selva Almada b. The dates are important. The seventeen-year old student was drugged, tortured and killed, before her body was mutilated and dumped.
The culprits were two young men linked to the highest echelons of political power in the region. Even so, it took the intervention of the Church and mass rallies for a proper investigation to take place. Almada conducted fieldwork, interviewing friends and relatives of the victims and the accused, in small provincial towns.
She portrays a world in which women are often denied agency and the border between sex and violence is fragile. Economics plays a part too. One of the victims worked as a prostitute. Another had started her first day as a maid. In both cases, in different ways, this exposed them to the risk of violence. Class is also a factor.
Almada has stated that less importance is given to the death of a girl from a poor background than of one from a family with means. The first time the police take concerted action over a string of killings is when the victim is the daughter of a powerful man. Those imprisoned, and then grotesquely murdered in jail, have most likely nothing to do with the crime in question. At the heart of the matter, Almada reveals a justice system that is generally incompetent and often corrupt.
